Hello everybody,
It's good to see more and more people in the Forum. I guess, like me, they
found this distro very attractive,
This is what somebody should have done with Ubuntu long ago; give it a good and thorough sprucing up. In other words a good paint job was needed.

Of course the extra software is very desirable to most of us as long as it doesn't violate any laws.
It's a bonus to most of us newbies who have a difficult time adding software from other sources except Synaptic

The Mint is here to stay. Keep coming and spread the good word fellows

here here, I have never been a fan of the default Ubuntu sludgy brown/orange blue is much nicer and Kubuntu just does not seem to work as well. The codecs are the bit that first attracted me to mint as I was fedup with trying to get codecs installed on my laptop which did not like any other distros that I tried other than Ubuntu.

Just put together a micro ATX linux box from mostly old parts (P4 1.6, cheap pcchips board, old ram, etc.). I Couldn't get Ubuntu edgy to install without errors, so I downloaded Linux Mint Bea and it loaded right up. Had to do a little work to get the on-board SiS 661 video working properly (I'm new to Linux), but now it works fine. Played music CD, DVD movies, and avi files without a hitch. Great distro - glad I downloaded it!